07 May, 2012

I wrote this post to test pelican's integration with pygments. Data sourced from wikipedia.

{
    "first_appearance": {
        "novel": "The Bourne Identity",
        "film": "The Bourne Identity"
    },
    "last_appearance": { 
        "novel": "The Bourne Dominion",
        "film": "The Bourne Ultimatum"
    },
    "created_by": "Robert Ludlum",
    "portrayed_by": [
        "Matt Damon",
        "Richard Chamberlain",
        "Jeff Pierce"
    ],
    "more_info": {
        "aliases":  [
            "Jean-Pierre",
            "Delta One",
            "Cain",
            "John Michael Kane",
            "Nicolas Lemanissier",
            "Charles Briggs",
            "George P. Washburn",
            "Foma Kiniaev",
            "Mr. Cruet (Supremacy)",
            "Gilberto de Piento",
            "Paul Kay",
            "Adam Stone"
        ],
        "gender": "male",
        "spouse": [
            "Dao Webb",
            "Marie St. Jacques"
        ],
        "children": [
            "Jamie Webb",
            "Alison Webb",
            "Joshua Webb",
            "Alyssa Webb"
        ]
    }
}

01 April, 2012

The first thing I notice in HackU competitions in India is how students manage their source code as they develop. Most of them do not use a revision control system and maintain manual copies of their source code. I have seen students trying to figure out which directory of their source code was the working version. I have done that myself when I was in college. It is high time that any course that involves an iota of programming also includes a course on revision control systems - atleast a practical one. The benefits of such a course is way too obvious:

• Revision control is 101 of professional software development - the earlier students learn this, the sooner they can use it for all their projects in college - much better way of backing up source code than using names like project1, proj1.bak etc.
• It helps students work in teams and organizes contribution to a single code base.
• This is good time to introduce distributed revision control systems like git to students. Most of the open source projects on the internet are hosted using git.
• It enables students to publish their projects on the web using sites like github or bitbucket. Colleges should provide source code hosting (git based preferably) for students to store and track code.
• It becomes easier for the college to keep a record of students' projects over years.
• It becomes easier for faculty to look at commit logs and audit for original development :)
• It is a potential research area for interested CS students.